| "Gray Matters: Contemporary Poetry and the Poetics of Cognition" aims to rethink the ways we understand contemporary bodies and identities through an exploration of human consciousness as it is interpreted in the literary genre of poetry and the science of the embodied mind. The dominant poststructuralist theories behind much of contemporary literary criticism view the body as a surface that is inscribed and shaped by cultural influences and view human identity similarly as a construction of language and culture. As a result, contemporary poetry, with its emphases on individual expression, often of embodied experience, has been perceived as a naive or belated genre. An interdisciplinary approach to poetry using theories of embodied cognition, however, allows me to move below the surface of the body to explore the constitutive powers of its deep systems and processes, taking seriously the role the body's materiality plays in the formation of identity, along with the forces of cultural power and discourse. This approach thus also allows me to view contemporary poetry not as naive or belated, but as engaged in complicated ways with evoking a centered, embodied experience of an identity that at the same time remains multiplicitous, non-monolithic, and shifting. Chapter 1 examines A.R. Ammons's evocations of the workings of embodied consciousness in the content of his lyric poems and the form of his long poems, ultimately offering a revision of romantic models of organicism. Chapter 2 investigates Sylvia Plath's explorations of different models of identity including a performative model in "Lady Lazarus" and a deeper, more embodied model in the image of the hive in the bee sequence, the latter offering her a more potent site for feminist resistance. Chapter 3 turns to Lyn Hejinian's book-length autobiographical poem My Life , and uses Antonio Damasio's theories about the formation and evolution of autobiographical memories and cognitive theories of the "modular mind" to argue that My Life both thematizes and enacts the aesthetic nature of human existence, an aesthetic nature arising from its biological as well as its linguistic roots. Finally, in Chapter 4 I analyze Harryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary to explore the ways in which discourse and the embodied mind intersect and interact in the experience of inspiration and in the event of poetic creation. |
